over-build renewables, thereby making it extremely costly

Compared to nuclear? Go check out the cost and schedule overruns for Hinkley C and then talk to me about cost. $40 billion and counting so far.

You could have made an actual argument here... but then you decided on the "renewables only work because of nuclear imports from France" fairy tale.

And we all know that this is a lie and also who likes to tell it. So please, stop reading that bullshit and use those trash tabloids as the only thing they are somewhat useful as: toilet paper ...

Some parts of it are... there is a certain amount of either nuclear base load or storage infrastructure needed.

But more than 50% renewables are easily doable without much strain on modern grids (modern models for nuclear usually plan with ~30-35% minimal base load needed...).

Also another argument for specific fossil fuels -domestic availability and thus more independence- is also a pro argument for renewables.

So no matter where you stand, if you are not at least using (or planning to use in near future) 50% cheap renewables in your electricity mix (or see narratives about expensive renewables even) then you know that the decision is not taken for economic reasons but because decision makers are getting money to stick with more fossil fuels than necessary.

Renewables are an economical no-brainer right now. Actual complexity of balancing out their fluctuating production with base load or storage comes much later (although in the case of nuclear the build times are often long enough that you should start soon). And still there are so many countries so far away from the absolute no-brainer amount of renewables.

Germany's logic for energy is wild.

"Our biggest supplier for fossil fuels is imploding from failing to conquer a neighbor a tenth their size, let's become even more reliant on them for energy"

This happens all the time. It happened to New York State after the decommission of Indian Point, it happened to Germany, it literally happens everywhere nuclear reactors are decommissioned, because fossil fuels provide the reliable and tunable capacity of nuclear power with explicit domestic and foreign subsidies driving down its cost. We keep talking about renewables displacing fossil fuels but German fossil gas consumption is going up, not down.

They don't work well together. Nuclear needs to operate at as close to 100% uptime as possible, otherwise it isn't financially viable. What happens when it's very windy and sunny and renewables are creating more power than we need? You can't just run nuclear to cover the peaks in demand, it doesn't work that way.

Nuclear base load and renewables is actually one of the two viable concepts (the other is storage).

But electricity demand will massively increase: Most countries nowadays only cover about 20% of their primary energy by electricity. But all the oil and gas used in transport and industry needs to be converted to electricity (directly or indirectly). (On the other hand electricity is more efficient in a lot of cases, so it's not the full factor 5 in increase that will be needed. But still a lot.)

And not single country seems to be able to even start investing on the scale necessary to build the needed base load. ~30-35% is the minimum, but that's 30-35% of the future demand. Which is probably at least 2,5 times the demand of today. So basically any country that is not planning or already building enough nuclear capacities to cover at least 80% of todays electricity production purely on nuclear (which will be ~30% of the demand in 2-3 decades) is already failing. And pretending that that one (or a few) reactor(s) planned is more than symbolic is a lie.

As I said France comes close but only if they start being honest and build all the 14 planned new reactors. And if they can keep their aging fleet of existing reactors running long enough until those are build. (PS: The few lucky countries with a lot of hydro potential can of course cover some of that base load with hydro. But that's irrelevant for most other countries without the same geography.)

Why nobody is actually planning proper amounts while pretending to trust in nuclear power as a solution? That's easy: the cost. Even when we assume that the massive nuclear upbuild needed is not more expensive than the alternatively needed infrastructure and storage, the latter is an continues investment over decades. Nuclear comes with a massive upfront cost now to be ready in decades (maybe one if Europe suddenly rediscovers how to build them quickly, but I wouldn't bet on it).

And it even becomes worse. Most countries planning with nuclear are also lacking proper renewables although their own model requires them and massively so (65%-70% to complement the nuclear base load... multiplied with at least 2,5 for the future demand...).

That's the legacy of decades of nuclear lobbyism going for the perceived competition and trying to discredit renewables or nowadays telling us how storage is impossible on the required scale. At this point reacting to plans to build renewables with "oh, so you want to burn more fossil fuels and kill the planet?" is completely normal although also completely insane of course.

And now comes the best part: nuclear power doesn't work without the same storage they tell everyone isn't possible: Just look at France. They are massively overproducing in summer right now and still don't have enough electricity in the coldest weeks of winter and need imports. But now imagine a future where everyone is either running nuclear and renewables or even more renewables and storage. There will be no export market most of the year (because everyone has a surplus at the same time) making nuclear much more expensive. There also will be no one with a sizeable surplus in the coldest weeks of the year, which means you need even more reactors producing even more surplus over most of the year.

RTE (France' grid provider) did a extensive study in 2020 about electricity demand in 2050. That's where the minimal needed base load of about 35% comes from, also the announced 14 new reactors first announced less than a year later coincidently have the capacity to cover 35% of their projected demand in 2050. (Side note: They also compared their models to purely renewable ones... always funny to see how the guys working in that field and with nuclear are not the ones doubting the viability of a renewable model)

The gist of it... nuclear and renewables are economical viable compared to fully renewable models, even more than the minimum base load can even be better economically. But only because all their models were based on hydrogen production basically all year from excess electricity... used in industry, as long term storage or as the new way of exporting energy.